Boring Vacation Wild Affair

I was forty-three years old in January, staring at a window streaked with salt and rain, in a room that smelled like damp wool and old radiator dust, and I was doing it on purpose, which was somehow the worst part. My wife Patricia says I do things on purpose too much, and she said it out loud at the Hendersons' dinner party three weeks ago, in front of six people and a platter of dry pork loin, that I was rigid, that I was boring, that I planned my spontaneity two weeks in advance on a spreadsheet. I said her idea of passion was irritating, which was a stupid thing to say because Patricia at forty-four is the least irritating person alive unless you count the way she wins arguments, and she took my stupid sentence, turned it over in her hands like a novel she was going to savage in a review, and booked a non-refundable week at the Sandpiper Inn in Whistle Cove, Oregon, that same night.

Her plan, announced over breakfast with the smugness of a woman who has already won, was for us to have the most boring vacation in recorded history. No hiking, no whale watching, no spontaneous detours to lighthouses. She was going to sit in a rocking chair and stare at the fog, and I was going to watch her do it, and presumably at some point I would crack and admit she was right about me, that I was a rigid little accountant with a heart made of filing cabinets.

So there I was at the window on a Tuesday afternoon, watching the fog refuse to become a proper storm, which it had been doing since we arrived on Sunday, just hanging there over the water like a curtain nobody bothered to finish hemming. The boardwalk was empty. Everything in Whistle Cove was empty in late January, the taffy shop shut up with a handwritten sign, the arcade dark, the surf shop renting nothing to nobody. The radiator under the window clanked once and gave up. The room was cold in a way that felt personal.

Behind me, Patricia unpacked in pointed silence. That is a skill she has, pointed silence, forty-four years of practice and she could probably teach a seminar. She put her sweaters in the second drawer, which was my drawer, and hung her dresses in front of my half of the closet, and unfolded the crossword book she had brought with a snap that meant nothing and everything.

"Nice view," she said, not looking up.

"It's fog," I said.

"I know what it is, Martha. I picked it."

She had picked it, and she had picked it to punish me, and the really galling thing was that she was right that I would find it unbearable, because I was already composing a list of the things we were not doing, in my head, in columns.

* * *

The only place still open for dinner in the whole town was a diner called Effie's, half empty, lit like a waiting room, with chowder that turned out to be genuinely good, thick and full of clams and pepper, which Patricia pretended not to enjoy on principle. We sat in a booth by the window with rain ticking against the glass and a laminated menu nobody had wiped down since October, and she stirred her chowder in slow circles and looked at me with the expression she used to wear before saying something devastating in one of her old manuscripts, back before she quit publishing at thirty-eight to run a bed-and-breakfast, which is a whole other argument we have had many times and I am not getting into it here.

"Go on," she said. "Do something spontaneous."

"I'm eating chowder."

"Ordering chowder is not spontaneous, Martha. You researched this diner in the car. I watched you do it on your phone while telling me you weren't."

I had researched the diner. I had also researched the tide tables, the one hardware store, and the hours of the historical museum, which is closed Mondays, so at least there was that to look forward to. I put my spoon down and considered my position, which was bad, and my wife, who was watching me with her chin propped on her hand and her gray hair falling out of its clip the way it does when she wants to look like she does not care about anything, which is a performance, because she cares about everything, obsessively, that is actually her whole problem.

"Fine," I said, and I picked up the dessert card that had been sitting under the sugar caddy, and I ordered a slice of key lime pie, which I do not even like. Key lime pie is Patricia's dessert. I am a chocolate person, always have been, and she knows it, and I ordered the key lime anyway and she knew exactly what I was doing and her mouth twitched at the corner.

"That's your idea of wild," she said.

"It's a start."

The pie came and it was fluorescent green and probably frozen, and I ate the entire thing, every bite, while she watched, and somewhere around the halfway mark I stopped being able to taste it and started being able to feel it, this cold sour substance going down my throat like a statement, and by the last bite my eyes were watering and Patricia was laughing, actually laughing, bent forward into her chowder bowl, and something in my chest went very still and very determined, because I thought, fine, you want to see me be spontaneous, I will show you spontaneous, I will have a wild affair with you, my own wife, this week, in this freezing room, and it is going to be memorable and you are going to regret booking it.

"Are you crying over pie?" she asked.

"No," I said, wiping my eyes with the paper napkin, which tore.

* * *

We walked back along the boardwalk in the drizzle because the car was parked three blocks away and also because I wanted to make a point about walking in rain without an umbrella, which she noticed and commented on, and I told her to mind her own business, and she said the boardwalk was public so technically it was her business too, and that is the kind of thing that is funny the first fifty times and then you marry them.

The fog had come inland while we ate, so the lampposts along the boardwalk were just blurred orange smears, and the water under the planks was doing something slow and heavy, and my shoes were soaked through, and I kept my list of grievances in my back pocket like a card I was saving, and instead I said, "This fog is never going to rain."

"It's not rain, it's marine layer," Patricia said. "It's very literary. I could write a whole depressing chapter about it."

"You quit."

"I quit, yes, thank you, Martha, I remember."

We got back to the Sandpiper, up the outside stairs with the loose railing, into the room, where the radiator clanked its one clank and the window was still streaked and the bed was still made with those tight hospital corners that the owner, a woman named Dot who was about seventy and terrified of nothing, had made with what I can only assume was a steamroller. Patricia sat down in the rocking chair by the window, the one she had claimed, and picked up her crossword, and did not fill in a single letter, just sat there holding the pen, and I understood that she was not even enjoying the punishment she had designed, that she had designed a boring week for both of us and was suffering in it too, out of pride.

I stood in the middle of the room with my wet socks and I decided that the affair would start tonight.

Not in a dramatic way. I am not dramatic, that is the entire accusation on the table. But I went into the cold little bathroom and I took off my wet socks and I put on the navy blue slip I had packed and never worn anywhere in six years, not on anniversaries, not on trips, it had tags, I had to take the tags off in there with a nail clipper, and I looked at myself in the spotted mirror for a while, forty-three and soft in the middle and pasty from a Northwest winter, and I thought, well, she married this, she has literally seen this every day for twelve years, the surprise is not going to be the packaging.

The surprise was going to be the approach. I had a plan for the approach, which I recognized was an ironic thing to have, and I decided to modify it, roughly, on the spot, which for me is like jumping off a pier.

I came out of the bathroom and Patricia looked up from her crossword, and the pen stopped moving, and she said, "What are you doing," in a voice that was not the argument voice, that was an older voice, a voice I had not heard since before the bed-and-breakfast, and I crossed the room and stood in front of the rocking chair with my heart doing something I am not going to describe in detail and I said, "I want to have an affair. With you. Starting now. Can I kiss you?"

She put the crossword down on the arm of the chair very carefully, like it was a live thing, and she looked up at me, and the fog pressed against the window behind her, and she said, "Martha. You're asking permission to seduce me."

"Yes."

"That is the least spontaneous thing I have ever heard."

"Do you want me to stop asking?"

"No," she said, fast, quicker than I have heard her say anything in a year. "No, keep asking. Ask me everything."

I reached down and took her hand, and her fingers were cold from the room, and I pulled her up out of the rocking chair, and that is where the boring vacation, so far as either of us was concerned, officially ended.

She stood up and we were suddenly very close, close enough that I could see the gray in her hair had gone almost silver at the temples since the last time I had paid attention, and I put my hand on the back of her neck and kissed her, and it was a bad kiss, I knew it immediately, too much teeth, too much hurry, the kiss of a woman who had rehearsed nothing and was executing a plan she had abandoned four minutes ago. She pulled back and laughed, not a mean laugh, more of a surprised one, and she said, "Okay, that was an assault. Try again, slower. You have done this before, I have witnesses."

"I'm nervous," I said, which was true and which I had not planned to admit.

"I know you're nervous. You bit me. Slow down. We have a whole boring week."

So I tried again, slower, and it turns out that slowing down is a skill like anything else, and that after twelve years of kissing the same mouth you can forget to actually look at it. I put my hand flat against her back this time and I kissed her the way I would have at thirty-one, before the bed-and-breakfast, before the spreadsheets, before the Hendersons' dinner party three weeks ago where I said the word irritating and meant it and had regretted it every day since in a way I had never once said out loud. She made a small sound into my mouth and her hand came up and found the hem of the navy slip and just rested there, asking without asking, and I said, "Yes," against her lips, because she had told me to keep asking and apparently I was going to hold her to the inverse of that too.

"Take this off or leave it on?" she said, tugging at the strap gently.

"Leave it. I only just took the tags off."

She laughed again into my neck and then we were moving toward the bed, which involved her walking backward and me steering her by the hips, and the radiator clanked its one clank as if it had been waiting for a cue, and she sat down on the edge of Dot's hospital-cornered bed and looked up at me with an expression I had forgotten she owned, the one from the apartment on Alder Street with the bad water pressure, the one that said she was interested and amused and entirely present. "Come here," she said, and I did, and I will spare you the choreography